The Control of Contagious Disease in Nineteenth-Century British Paediatric Hospitals

Abstract

SUMMARY

Special hospitals for children were first established in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The British delayed copying the French example for fifty years, in part because of the disquieting mortality caused by the spread of contagious diseases at the Enfants Malades in Paris. The privately managed British hospitals adopted varying tactics to minimize cross-infection on the wards. The smaller ones did not admit fever cases, while keeping one or two isolation cots handy for any infectious case arising on the wards. The larger hospitals cautiously admitted some children with infectious illness and attempted to provide complete isolation from the other in-patients. The management of the problems involved will be discussed in this paper. It will also be shown how the establishment of public fever hospitals, in the last quarter of the century, gradually relieved the voluntary paediatric hospitals of their responsibility for cases of notifiable disease. Finally, it will be argued that the British hospital system of coping with contagious illness served as a model for reform in France.

contagious diseases, infectious diseases, cross-infection, isolation, dispensary, fever, paediatric hospitals, mortality